Can Philadelphia barbershops help increase black voter turnout?

One startup hopes to recruit local barbers to battle misinformation and disillusionment about US elections

Branden Turner cuts Deverain Word’s hair at the Prime Time barbershop in Ferguson, Mo. Turner and other barbers around the US are in prime positions to help educate local communities on elections and sociopolitical issues.
Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Duerward Beale goes to his local barbershop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, two or three times a month. For Beale – known as “Woody” to his friends – the barbershop trip is not just a quick in-and-out appointment. Instead, the visit often spans hours, packed with conversation.

Working with local media partners and 50 barbers across Philadelphia, Beale is hoping to use the hours that black men spend in their local barbershops to increase black voter turnout.

Voter turnout in Philadelphia, also known as the City of Brotherly Love, has been on an increasingly downward trajectory – with the exception of 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama received 99% of the vote or more in 13 wards. According to Beale, this reduction in voter participation is partly due to disillusionment in local communities. Philadelphians struggle with higher unemployment than the rest of the nation, misinformation about political processes, and mistrust in the system, especially by many black male residents, many of whom are out on parole or just returning home from serving time.

To tackle these issues, Beale wants to recruit and train barbers to help cut through some of the mistrust. On Tuesday, his plan – officially known as Sharp Insight – came closer to becoming reality when it was awarded $250,000 by the Knight Foundation.

Barbershops: heart of the community?

“You name it, we talk about it in the barbershop. We feel comfortable in barbershops to have an opinion,” Beale said. “On any given busy day, you might see 15 to 20 people in a barbershop while you are waiting for two or three hours to get your haircut. So it gives you a greater opportunity to engage people or to talk to people.”

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His plan calls for barbers to be trained in a workshop held by the Philadelphia’s Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program (YOACAP) to answer questions about who is eligible to vote, as well as to provide facts about the 2016 elections.

Beale is the executive director of YOACAP, which has been around since 1988 and focuses on community outreach, education workshops and after-school programs. Its target demographic is Philadelphians between 15 and 34 years old. This is not the first YOACAP outreach effort based on barbershops. In the past, YOACAP went into barbershops and beauty salons to register eligible voters.

According to Beale, barbers are interested in such programs because they are stakeholders in their communities. Even those who don’t have their own shops can still rent a chair and maintain their own set of clients.

“People respect that,” Beale said. “They are usually from a neighborhood where a lot of people know them.”

Sharp Insight has historically focused on outreach efforts around measuring high blood pressure and increasing awareness about sexually transmitted diseases. The company’s latest proposal would track the impact that barbers trained in electoral issues have on their customer base and their communities.

“The proposal blends the everyday setting of a barbershop with information-sharing, making civic participation a routine part of daily life,” said John Bracken, the Knight Foundation’s vice president for media innovation.

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Sharp Insight is one of 22 projects selected by the Knight Foundation as winners of its Knight News Challenge on elections. The projects aim to tackle electoral and civic challenges by making it easier to request absentee ballots with smartphones, creating affordable and accurate alternatives to exit polling, creating a public library of political ads from key 2016 primary election states, and making a searchable archive of campaign speech transcripts. Others tackle issues like dark money – unlimited donations to nonprofits that can spend money to influence elections but aren’t required to identify their donors – and restoring voting rights of those with prior felony convictions.

“The winners leverage elections as the best opportunity for Americans to shape policy and reimagine their shared future,” Bracken said.

Philadelphia’s disillusioned black men

Beale hopes the future holds higher voter turnout among black men in Philadelphia.

According to The New York Times, Philadelphia is the third in the nation when it comes to “missing” black men, either killed at a young age or incarcerated. Trailing behind New York and Chicago, Philadelphia’s 36,000 missing men account for almost half of the black men in the city.

The program will focus largely on black men in Philadelphia, many of whom are on parole or are just coming home from being incarcerated, according to Beale. In addition to being confused about whether they qualify to vote, these men are often disillusioned with the US political system.

“[They] just have a mistrust of the system, of elected officials because they feel like elected officials have an agenda,” Beale said. “They are nervous voting for the people they don’t really know about. Often times, they just won’t go. ‘I am not doing that. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t know who to vote for. I’ll wait for the next one.’ If you sit there and listen to what they are saying, a lot of it is, they don’t have information.”

Manipulated pictures of US President Barack Obama with different hairstyles are kept on a display at a barber shop in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

To help get the word out about the program, Sharp Insight has partnered with iHeartMedia and Loraine Ballard Morrill, the media company’s news and community affairs director for six Philadelphia radio stations. According to Morrill, Philadelphia communities rely on the radio for a lot of their news and view it as a trusted source of information. Through this partnership, she believes Sharp Insight will be able to send a message that will be heard.

“One of the things that politicians rely on is the lack of voter participation,” said Morrill, who is now also the news and community affairs director at Sharp Insight. “Sadly, here in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, many elected officials run unopposed and they do that because voter participation is low. Sometimes people get elected into office by as little as 2,000 votes. And that’s not a good thing for our political process – for our democratic process.”

This year, during the city’s mayoral primary, just 27% of registered voters came to the polls. The voter turnout for mayoral elections has been on a downward slide for over four decades, with turnout dropping from 77% in 1971 to 67% in 1987 to 49% in 1991.

Beale hopes that his small army of barbers will begin to reverse that trend, one shave at a time.